“What?”
“The baby. He just said ‘ice cream’ clear as day.”
“No,” I said, “did he?”
“His first words, John. ‘Ice cream.’ I heard him.”
I have a picture of that moment in my head, Iris squatting over the baby, her hair in a ponytail, shoulders bare and freckled with the sun, her shorts riding up her thighs, her sandals and painted toenails and the shining arches of her feet, and the train standing there like an illusion, a moving wall, abracadabra. I bent to my son, one eye on the passenger cars as the doors wheezed open. “Ice cream,” I said. “Ice cream, Johnnie.”
A jerk of the fleshy arms, the glutinous hands clapping together in accidental percussion. And the reduced gurgling glissade of sound: “Iiiice,” John Jr. said. “Iiiice.”
When I looked up, Professor Shadle was standing there with his suitcase in hand. He was in his mid-sixties, short — very short, almost dwarfish — with a pronounced midsection and clumps of white hair that might have been cotton balls stuck randomly to his skull. “Beautiful baby,” he murmured.
“Oh, excuse me,” I said, rising to my feet to take his damp dwarfish hand in my own. “Professor Shadle, welcome. To, well, to Indiana. We met in Buffalo, you remember?”
“Yes,” he said, in a lisping rasp, his eyes ducking away from mine. “Of course.”
“And this is my wife, Iris. And our son, John Jr.”
“He just said his first words,” Iris put in. She was beaming. “Aside from ‘mama’ and ‘dada,’ I mean.”
The professor lifted his eyebrows. “Really? And what were these momentous words?”
“Ice cream,” we said in unison, and then there was the echo of the little voice beneath us, John Jr. mute no more. Two words, thin as wire: Iiiice keen.
“Beautiful,” the professor breathed. “Just beautiful.” And he left it at that.
In the evening there was a dinner in Professor Shadle’s honor at the house on First Street, Prok having whipped up one of his goulashes with a side of homemade coleslaw (“For the cooling effect”), after which we retired to the living room to watch the films on equipment Prok had borrowed from the audiovisual department at the university. Shadle had eight films in all, each sequestered in a round tin, and he chattered happily with Prok as he meticulously threaded the first of them through the projector. We were all there, all of us of the inner circle, and the atmosphere was relaxed and convivial — in fact there was a real air of pleasurable anticipation, as if we’d all gone to the picture show and were sitting there in the dark awaiting the first flickers of light to illuminate the screen.
“All we need is popcorn,” Hilda Rutledge said out of the corner of her mouth.
“And Jujubes,” Iris said, “don’t forget Jujubes.”
“You like those — Jujubes? Really?” Violet Corcoran was sitting on the floor, on the rag rug, her elbows propped up on the chair behind her. “They practically pull the fillings out of your teeth. Dots,” she said. “Give me Dots anytime.”
“What about jawbreakers?” This was Corcoran, leaning in, hands clasped over his knees. “That’s what we had as kids. Last the whole movie, double feature even.”
“Sure,” Iris said, “if you don’t suck or swallow — or use your teeth. Use your teeth and they’re gone in no time. We used to go through a whole bag of jawbreakers in a double feature. Remember that, John — that candy store across from the movie theater? Laura Hutchins and I used to buy the stuff there and smuggle it in.”
I gave her a smile. I was happy, feeling relaxed and tranquil, and for once alcohol had nothing to do with it. “At about half the price they charged in the theater.”
“Captive audience,” Corcoran said with a shrug. “You can’t blame them for trying to make a good Yankee dollar.”
“No,” Iris said, “but you can save a good Yankee nickel if you think ahead, but of course most kids don’t.”
“Licorice whips,” Hilda said.
Iris’s eyes went distant. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “licorice whips. Yeah. But the red ones, only the red ones—”
The women were in summer dresses, their shoulders bare, their limbs fluid, poured like liquid, bare flesh, the hovering light, and Prok at the shades now, closing down the fading sun while Professor Shadle worked at the projector. We were in shirtsleeves — Rutledge, Corcoran and I, and Corcoran was even sporting a pair of shorts in a bright madras pattern — but Prok was wearing his jacket and bow tie still, and I wondered about that until it occurred to me that he was putting on a show of formality for his colleague from Buffalo. Shadle had no such scruples. He’d come to dinner in a voluminous Hawaiian shirt, through which he sweated steadily as he bent to the projector. “You’ll be seeing Dannie — he’s a year younger — and Peterkin,” he said, in a voice that lifted away from his conversation with Prok to address us all. “They were wed last year, or at least that’s the way I like to put it. But you’ll see, in just a”—he paused to focus on pulling the last loop of film through the projector and attaching it to the take-up reel—“in just a minute.”
Prok said nothing. He’d completed his round of the windows, and the room was illuminated now only by the lamp that stood behind the projector. It was noticeably hotter with the shades drawn, and there was an aggregate smell of us, of the inner circle, the gently perspiring odor of our humanity, friends and colleagues all, casually gathered on yet another social occasion. Prok said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking — he was thinking that “wed” was just a euphemism, a convenience, and that Professor Shadle, despite his training as a biologist, was dangerously close to falling into the category of the sex shy. I wondered if we had his history.
But then, just as Shadle straightened up and flicked on the projector, the door from the kitchen swung open and Mac appeared, her thin white arms bowed before her under the weight of the biggest ceramic bowl in the house, and the scent of fresh-popped corn, invested liberally with butter and salt, filled the room. “Well,” she laughed, setting the bowl down on the coffee table, “I thought since we are having a picture show,” and there was a corresponding whoop from Hilda.
“Perfect,” Hilda exclaimed, “perfect.” She drew up her legs and leaned forward to dip her hand in the bowl. “Did you know we were just reminiscing about the movies, and here we are, with popcorn and everything?”
And then the lamp snapped off and the projector began to click and groan and the first flickers of substance illuminated the silica granules of the screen Prok had set up at the far end of the room. I saw a patch of grass, wavering and dark, the camera jumping in the next frame to the pocked gray trunks of a grove of pine trees surrounded by a hurricane fence, and then we were in the enclosure and the creatures were there, two dense clots of life rising up out of the backdrop till they filled the screen and the camera drew back. The animals’ quills were combed down like the densest of beards, only their eyes and the occasional glimpse of their teeth shining through. They seemed to sniff at each other, nose to nose, like dogs meeting for the first time, and then, to the prompting of Shadle’s narration (“Now watch, this is precious”), they rose up simultaneously on their hind legs and embraced, their black-lipped mouths coming together as if for a kiss. The whole operation was slow and stately, a kind of porcupine minuet.
Prok let out a low chuckle of delight. “Foreplay,” he said, in a wondering voice, “they’re engaging in foreplay.”
And so they were. Beasts, mere beasts, and they might have been human, philosophers in their long coats, coming together in the tenderest way, taking their time, enjoying themselves.